Has FriendFeed been Giving Handouts to the Big Boys of Blogging?

It seems like, for better or worse, we just can't quite come to a decision about FriendFeed, can we?  Perhaps we're resigned to an endless back and forth about the social aggregating platform.  But, as many of us know, any controversy converts to traffic, which is something FriendFeed can take solace in.

Getting to the point, I just did a little checking of my feeds and read a post written by Allen Stern on the rather uncanny way a few top bloggers have received massive quantities of followers.  Those top bloggers, no strangers to those of us in the blogosphere, would be Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, and Loic Lemeur.   I can definitively say that I too have been annoyed, from time to time, that what FriendFeed deems most significant in my feed is anything flowing from the fingertips of the aforementioned internet celebrities.  

Though none of us should particularly care how popular those fellows are (good for them, after all), because of the massive followers they've accrued, more eyes see the content those bloggers post.  That translates to publicity, and traffic means money.  So, for better or worse, FriendFeed has been handing out traffic to the big names of blogging.

The reason Arrington, Scoble, Calacanis and Lemeur are so popular on FriendFeed is because they are part of a nine-person "default" list of friends created by FriendFeed. When you join, those are a few of the people FriendFeed automatically volunteers for potential friends.  In the words of one of my least-favored hip-hop artists, that translates to "money in da bank."  

But you can't really blame any of those guys, can you?  After all, it isn't directly their fault that FriendFeed likes them enough to volunteer them to every new user.  If anything, they've been dilligent enough in creating a web presence that Friendfeed's defaulting gift is just icing on a hard-earned cake.  

That doesn't mean that FriendFeed shouldn't reconsider and restructure its defaulting process, however.  For many bloggers and internet personalities, platforms like FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter, Plurk and many more are tools that can be used to build business.  Digg has been accused of using gaming algorithms to push favored users, and whether that is true or not, those accusations have permanently tarnished the once improving image of Digg.  FriendFeed, as its still treading water, really can't afford the negative publicity such accusations will create.

To the four fellows who are lucky enough to be on the defaulting list of FriendFeed, I tip my hat to you sirs.  As for FriendFeed, I sincerely hope that they can squash this before it is blown out of proportion.